Speaker 1: All right, hello everyone, So my apologies for the late start.
Speaker 1: We unfortunately had a massive, distributed anil of service attack
Speaker 1: against our servers.
Speaker 2: When Elon Musk sat down to interview Donald Trump on
Speaker 2: his platform X, it was easy to ridicule the world's
Speaker 2: richest man, known for his innovation in space travel, was
Speaker 2: experiencing technical difficulties.
Speaker 1: And so it's not time to proceed. But as this
Speaker 1: massive attack illustrates, there's a lot of opposition to people
Speaker 1: just hearing what President Trump has to say.
Speaker 2: But the conversation was interesting in another way, showing just
Speaker 2: how close these two men have become.
Speaker 3: And so we have to consider it an honor.
Speaker 2: But congratulations and breaking every record in the book tonight.
Speaker 1: That's great, Well, thank you.
Speaker 2: Well, you'd almost forget that just two years ago the
Speaker 2: pair were openly hostile to each other.
Speaker 1: You know, he said the other day, I've never voted
Speaker 1: for a Republican.
Speaker 3: I said, I didn't know that. He told me voted
Speaker 3: for me. So he's another bullshit artist, but he's.
Speaker 4: Not going to be buying.
Speaker 2: It's now been revealed that Elon Musk has been working
Speaker 2: behind the scenes to fundraise for Trump for months, not
Speaker 2: just raising millions of dollars, but going to great lengths
Speaker 2: to keep his involvement secret from Schwartz Media. I'm Ruby Jones.
Speaker 2: This is seven AM today. Wall Street Journal reporter Dana
Speaker 2: Maddioli on the political transformation of Elon Musk and what
Speaker 2: she uncovered about his secret plans to return Trump to
Speaker 2: the White House. It's Thursday, August twenty two. Dana. You've
Speaker 2: been looking into Elon Musk's increasing influence on the US
Speaker 2: presidential race, and you uncovered all of this information about
Speaker 2: secret Friday meetings that Elon Musk was having building this
Speaker 2: network to help Donald Trump. Tell me about what you found.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's pretty remarkable. Not only has he come out
Speaker 5: and endorsed Donald Trump since the assassination attempt, he started
Speaker 5: this super political action committee, what we call a super
Speaker 5: pac in the US. They're different from a traditional pack
Speaker 5: in that, you know, corporations and labor unions form these
Speaker 5: old fashioned sorts of packs to back or oppose political candidates,
Speaker 5: and donors are limited to giving five thousand dollars a
Speaker 5: year to a pack, and packs can only give as
Speaker 5: much as thirty three hundred dollars a candidate. So super
Speaker 5: PACs are these groups that can raise unlimited sums of
Speaker 5: money for ads to support or oppose a candidate.
Speaker 6: In SpaceX like fashion, Trump donations are about to enter
Speaker 6: a new stratosphere. Elon Musk making some major donations. That's
Speaker 6: coming up to a new Trump super pac. That's according
Speaker 6: to a Wall Street Journal report. The Journal's data Mattioli
Speaker 6: broke this story. She's the everything.
Speaker 5: We reported that every Friday he has this hour long
Speaker 5: meeting with all the packs vendors where he gets like
Speaker 5: progress reports and how many doors were knocked on for
Speaker 5: Donald Trump? You know, how many voters were registered? What
Speaker 5: were the conversations like? And this is, like I said,
Speaker 5: this is a man that runs six different companies, right,
Speaker 5: It's not like he's got a lot of free time
Speaker 5: on his hands, but he's spending it with the intent
Speaker 5: of helping turn out eight hundred thousand voters in swing
Speaker 5: states in the US to help Trump win the election.
Speaker 2: And so we know about this super pac now, But
Speaker 2: initially Musk's involvement was Sacred Ride. Can you tell me
Speaker 2: about that?
Speaker 5: Yeah, he didn't want to contribute to it until after
Speaker 5: June thirtieth because there are regulatory filings quarterly regulatory filings
Speaker 5: for these packs that show all the donors. So what
Speaker 5: he did was starting in April, he started talking to vendors,
Speaker 5: trying to understand how he could be most of use
Speaker 5: for this campaign, started hiring vendors, getting proposals, and then
Speaker 5: he lined up a bunch of people that were not
Speaker 5: him to fund those first few months of operations, with
Speaker 5: the idea that he would give on or after July first,
Speaker 5: which wouldn't show up until the October filings. There was
Speaker 5: a report, I think it was like July twelfth by
Speaker 5: Bloomberg News saying that Elon was involved with this new
Speaker 5: super pac called the America Pack.
Speaker 3: And then we at the Wall Street Journal we started.
Speaker 5: Digging into this to see what was going on there,
Speaker 5: and we learned that not only was he involved in
Speaker 5: the super pac, he had headed it up and he
Speaker 5: was willing to give forty five million dollars a month
Speaker 5: to it.
Speaker 1: So much are you still going to donate to Trump?
Speaker 4: Do you still donate forty five million dollars?
Speaker 5: And we put this big story out, which we were
Speaker 5: told really aggravated Elon.
Speaker 1: At no point did I say that I was going
Speaker 1: parents Trump. That was a fiction made up by the Wolf, the.
Speaker 5: Journeys they started, and we're trying to see how exactly
Speaker 5: it leaked out. And then subsequently we followed up about
Speaker 5: what was going on inside the super Pack, and you know,
Speaker 5: in July there was a big shakeup where a lot
Speaker 5: of the top people at the Pack were replaced with
Speaker 5: people from Governor Ron DeSantis's failed presidential bid, and they
Speaker 5: fired many of their big vendors and had several weeks
Speaker 5: very close to the election the election is fewer than
Speaker 5: ninety days away, where they weren't knocking ondoors, they weren't
Speaker 5: registering voters, and it led to.
Speaker 3: A bit of chaos.
Speaker 2: Okay, so we've got Elon Musk funneling about forty five
Speaker 2: million US dollars a month into this super Pac, which
Speaker 2: is an incredible amount of money. But at the same time,
Speaker 2: it seems like there's there's quite a bit of chaos
Speaker 2: going on inside that pack. Can you tell me a
Speaker 2: little bit more about what we know about what had
Speaker 2: actually achieved and what was happening behind the scenes.
Speaker 5: So, since launching, the superPAC had relied on two very
Speaker 5: big vendors. One was called in Field Strategies, the other
Speaker 5: ones called Racontour and as of July twelfth, they had
Speaker 5: knocked on seven hundred and twenty five thousand doors in
Speaker 5: swing states, They had one hundred and fifty thousand substantive
Speaker 5: conversations with prospective voters. They got twenty six thousand people
Speaker 5: to agree to get their absentee ballots, and they'd also
Speaker 5: started the voter registration process for more than eighty five
Speaker 5: hundred people, so they were making pretty decent progress. Then
Speaker 5: there was this shakeup where people from the Desanta's campaign
Speaker 5: came over and the vendors were fired sort of abruptly,
Speaker 5: and as a result of that, the door knocking stopped.
Speaker 5: There were those eighty five hundred voter registrations that were started,
Speaker 5: they were never mailed out to the voters to finish
Speaker 5: the process to actually register to vote.
Speaker 3: The website for the superPAC was.
Speaker 5: Not maintained and there was this bad glitch on the
Speaker 5: website and they stopped spending money and placements for advertising
Speaker 5: on Facebook and Instagram and all of their social media's.
Speaker 3: Were not updated once the vendors wrote let go.
Speaker 5: So this had a pretty big disruption for the pack,
Speaker 5: you know, very close to.
Speaker 3: When the elections taking place.
Speaker 2: After the break, how Elon Musk broke with the Democrats. Dana,
Speaker 2: You've been looking into Elon Musk's involvement in this super
Speaker 2: pack America pack, But can you tell me about exactly
Speaker 2: when Musk began to involve himself with getting Donald Trump
Speaker 2: re elected.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's really fascinating.
Speaker 5: Elon for many years has said that he voted exclusively
Speaker 5: Democratic down the Democratic ticket.
Speaker 3: He you know, was a big fan of President Obama.
Speaker 7: That Obama is sticking to his gun to means, sticking
Speaker 7: to the fairly radical changes that he initiated. I think
Speaker 7: it's by far the best space policy that we've had
Speaker 7: since Apollos. I mean, that's that's my most opinion, at
Speaker 7: least when you.
Speaker 3: Look at the companies he has.
Speaker 5: He's got six different companies, and many of them have
Speaker 5: you know, environmental missions which are mostly associated with the
Speaker 5: Democratic Party.
Speaker 3: Things, you know, things like getting off of fossil fuels.
Speaker 5: When you think of a company like Tesla or SpaceX
Speaker 5: is about you know, going to space because you know,
Speaker 5: there's a view that the Earth might not be sustainable.
Speaker 5: So he'd really been committed to democratic causes and voted
Speaker 5: for Democrats. And more recently we've seen this break between
Speaker 5: Elon and the Democrats, and some of that stemmed in
Speaker 5: the last four years with the Biden administration.
Speaker 4: Tesla's CEO, Elon Musk, accused President Biden of ignoring his
Speaker 4: electric vehicle company and paying more attention to legacy automakers.
Speaker 5: You know, Tesla's by far the biggest EV maker electric
Speaker 5: vehicle maker in the US, and whenever Biden hosted other
Speaker 5: car makers at the White House or had EV summits,
Speaker 5: Tesla never got the invite.
Speaker 3: With corporate leaders.
Speaker 4: Must have quote the notion of feud is not quite right.
Speaker 4: Biden's pointedly ignored Tesla at every turn and falsely stated
Speaker 4: to the public the GM leads the electric car industry
Speaker 4: when fact that.
Speaker 3: Really irked Tesla, but also Elon.
Speaker 5: So there's one thing to be disenchanted by the Democratic
Speaker 5: Party's another thing to throw your power and your giant
Speaker 5: microphone and a lot of money behind Donald Trump.
Speaker 3: Right, who he had openly criticized too.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: So it's there's been a big turning point there. And
Speaker 5: what we've seen is if you follow Musk's tweets closely,
Speaker 5: you could see that there's this political evolution happening. He
Speaker 5: started to espouse more right wing sentiment.
Speaker 1: I think we need to be very courtious about anything
Speaker 1: that is anti meritocratic and anything that is that results
Speaker 1: in the suppression of a free speech. So, you know,
Speaker 1: those are two of the aspects of the worklind Virus
Speaker 1: that I think are very dangerous.
Speaker 3: But he had stopped short of endorsing Donald Trump.
Speaker 5: And since the assassination attempt, you know, there was a
Speaker 5: lot of people, including Elon Musk, that came out and
Speaker 5: tweeted their official endorse of the candidate, and that's exactly
Speaker 5: what must do.
Speaker 2: So Elon had sort of been skirting around the edges.
Speaker 2: Why did he wait until then to publicly endorse Trump.
Speaker 5: You know, Elon's has all these companies, some of them
Speaker 5: you know, have very liberal employee bases, so there's, you know,
Speaker 5: always the risk of coming out with the political view
Speaker 5: and irking your own employee base.
Speaker 3: Companies like Tesla are electric car.
Speaker 5: Makers, and Trump is famously very close to the big
Speaker 5: oil CEOs, so there could be some issues with that.
Speaker 5: The last election cycle, CEOs did not want to come
Speaker 5: out in support of Donald Trump, and people have spoken
Speaker 5: to this election cycle that our CEOs have said this
Speaker 5: go around they feel like they could be more open
Speaker 5: about their support with Donald Trump, but they don't have
Speaker 5: to be closeted, as they say, you know, not just
Speaker 5: with Elon, but with other people in Silicon Valley, you know,
Speaker 5: the venture capitalists, the tech CEOs that they're frustrated on
Speaker 5: a number of fronts. Particular is concerned about a legal
Speaker 5: immigration in the US. That's something that's like very much
Speaker 5: a Republican talking point, and you know, border crossings and
Speaker 5: things of that nature. Elon has expressed concerns about election integrity,
Speaker 5: which is also a big Trump talking point. They're worried
Speaker 5: about inflation the economy, and we've seen this shift to
Speaker 5: the right in the tech world. So there's been other
Speaker 5: big name venture capitalists CEOs that have come out in
Speaker 5: support of Trump this cycle that you know, prior cycles
Speaker 5: had voted democratic or they sort of hid their support
Speaker 5: for Trump because it was something that people didn't want
Speaker 5: to be publicly associated with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I suppose the bigger kind of question in
Speaker 2: all of this, when you look at the amount of
Speaker 2: money that's being spent here, doesn't work. Are democratic elections
Speaker 2: won by who can funnel the most money into a campaign?
Speaker 5: Well, when I speak to you know Republican operatives, they
Speaker 5: sort of describe the need for this type of work.
Speaker 5: You know, they do need a robust ground game in
Speaker 5: order to combat what they're seeing from Democrats who do
Speaker 5: spend a lot of time and money on these issues.
Speaker 5: You know, it's really tough to say if they're one
Speaker 5: that way, but I would say that this is a
Speaker 5: strategy that both sides rely on. There are super packs
Speaker 5: on both sides of the aisle where very wealthy donors
Speaker 5: are able to circumvent some of the you know, individual
Speaker 5: contribution laws in place as it relates to individual contributions
Speaker 5: at elections, and this is where you know, really wealthy
Speaker 5: donors have influence. If you wanted to have a wealthy
Speaker 5: billionaire on your side, there's arguably fewer better than Elon Musk,
Speaker 5: who has one of the world's biggest microphones. Right that
Speaker 5: one on one conversation were millions of people, including undecided voters,
Speaker 5: tuned in. It wasn't like a typical journalist asking questions
Speaker 5: and guiding and probing.
Speaker 3: Some of the political reporters I spoke to sort of.
Speaker 5: Described it as a moderated Trump rally. Also fair to say,
Speaker 5: I mean, this is Elon's this is not as value Wick.
Speaker 3: You know, he is someone who's very innovative. He's able to.
Speaker 5: Launch these companies, but he's kind of new to politics,
Speaker 5: and it's you know, it's done world, it's got its
Speaker 5: own language, and it's a lot harder for outsiders to understand.
Speaker 1: And I think that is that is America, that is
Speaker 1: strength under fire, and so that's you know, a big
Speaker 1: you know, part of the reason why I was excited
Speaker 1: to endorse you as Dana.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 2: It's been great having a chat.
Speaker 3: Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2: Dana Mattioli is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal
Speaker 2: and author of The Everything War, Amazon's Ruthless quest to
Speaker 2: own the world and remake corporate power. Also in the
Speaker 2: news today, new legislation introduced in Parliament plans to find
Speaker 2: MPs who behave badly. The proposal for a new independent
Speaker 2: Parliamentary Standards Committee wants the power to investigate workplace complaints
Speaker 2: against MPs as well as issue fines or suspensions. It
Speaker 2: comes as independent MPs Kylie tink Alegraspender and Sophie Scamps
Speaker 2: joined forces to speak out against condescending, aggressive and often
Speaker 2: misogynistic behavior during question time, and a child is hospitalized
Speaker 2: every day in Australia due to domestic or family violence.
Speaker 2: According to new data published by the Australian Institute of
Speaker 2: Health and Welfare, it found more than five thousand young
Speaker 2: people have had a hospital day between twenty ten and
Speaker 2: twenty twenty one, with the most common presentation being fractures
Speaker 2: to the head. Of those statistics, more than half a
Speaker 2: female and more than a third had their first hospital
Speaker 2: stay under the age of five. And Ruby Jones, this
Speaker 2: is seven am.
Speaker 3: See you tomorrow.